I don’t think outside of Japan there’s anything like this “retirement age” of 35 that is imposed on programmers here. There’s absolutely nothing special about being over 35 years of age over there. All that matters is ultimately whether you can do the work or not, and often you have younger people in senior positions. But in Japan, there actually are a lot of places that impose this age limit of 35 when recruiting programmers, and from my experience, they favor younger programmers because that way they can keep costs down, leaving you with less and less programming work [as you get older]. In other words, the problem of the age limit is not a problem of individual ability, as it is say for athletes, but is a problem of organizations and their pay structure.

It was this situation that caused me to become impatient and uneasy that I was steadily drifting away from my goal of becoming a master programmer, the title of my blog. I suppose I could get around this by convincing myself that in a very broad sense, creating powerpoint slides and word documents to explain architecture is a type of programming, but really, I knew that what I really wanted was to open an IDE [Integrated Development Environment] or editor every day, and strive to boost my programming skills and improve the development environment.